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The U.S. Ryder Cup team is going to be loose because captain Tom Lehman has done everything he can to make sure of it. He has hosted team barbecues. He has taken them on fishing trips. He brought them to Ireland to scout the course and bond. He turned them into drinking buddies. He did everything but make Tiger and Phil eat s'mores, hold hands whenever they crossed the street and sing Kumbaya around a campfire.
  -- Newark Star-Ledger

After a long night in a Dublin pub, trading autographs for pints, Lehman and a few of his Ryder Cup players wobbled back to the hotel around 2 a.m. That's when somebody had a great idea -- OK, it was Lehman -- to sneak into Tiger Woods' room and leave him a note. On his back. While he slept. In indelible marker. "It was going to be something nasty with a Sharpie that wasn't going to come off easily," Lehman said. Just one problem: Woods was wearing a shirt.
  -- Newark Star-Ledger

Lehman has tried to create an atmosphere that will make it easier for his players to play well and win. That's why the photo session, which always has taken place at 9 a.m. on the Tuesday before the matches, will be held at 1:30 p.m. The morning, Lehman insisted, is for practice. Organizers were miffed. He didn't care.
  -- Newark Star-Ledger

Known for frontloading his schedule, Phil Mickelson is the only player on the U.S. Ryder Cup team who hasn't played a PGA Tour event since the team trip to Ireland, and the Ryder Cup likely will be his final event of the season.
  -- PGA.com

Arnold Palmer turned 77 on Sunday and hasn't competed in a stroke-play event since last October. That absence from competition will end near Baltimore this weekend, when Palmer tees it up in the Constellation Energy Classic starting Friday at Hayfields Country Club. He is well past his prime, even on the Champions Tour, but Palmer's earning power hasn't decreased. Golf Digest estimated his assorted non-playing interests brought him $25 million last year.
  -- Baltimore Sun

Michelle Wie played a practice round by herself yesterday, but she has played Mystic Rock several times before with John Daly when both players were vacationing at the resort. Daly was asked if he thought Wie had a chance to become the first female in 61 years to make a cut on the PGA Tour, especially on a course that measures 7,511 yards. "It is awfully long for her, and she's probably practicing going, 'Gosh, why does it have to rain because it's going to make it longer?' " Daly said. "But she hits a lot of fairways and she's going to have a lot of long clubs into the greens and her short game is going to have to be on."
  -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

John Deere Classic tournament director Clair Peterson said some players were upset last year when Wie accepted a sponsors exemption to play in his tournament, where she shot 70-71 and missed the cut by two strokes. But he said attendance was up by 10,000 to 15,000 Thursday and Friday when Wie was in the field and that most players, including Zach Johnson and tournament champion Sean O'Hair, supported her presence.
  -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Rocco Mediate was sitting in a green chair in the players' locker room, having just walked nine holes for the first time in more than a month. Tomorrow, when the 84 Lumber Classic begins at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort & Spa, he will play only his second PGA Tour event in three months. He has made the cut in just one tournament since the Masters -- the Wachovia Championship in May, when he finished tied for 59th.
  -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Still winless this year, Retief Goosen took two weeks off before playing in the HSBC World Match Play Championship this week at Wentworth outside London. Goosen also committed last week, along with Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk, to playing in the HSBC Champions Tournament in November at Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai -- which is sanctioned by the PGA European, Asian and Australasian tours and by the China Golf Association.
  -- USA Today

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